The President and The People

In the aftermath of the Dallas massacre and the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, President Barack Obama had a national conversation on race relations this past Thursday.

Billed as a “National Conversation with the People of the United States on Race Relations, Justice, Policing and Equality”—the one-hour ABC News discussion attempted to touch the surface of these urgent and deeply interrelated matters.

Unfortunately, several key people who were impacted by last week’s tragedies were not present because they were attending funerals. And some who did attend were left frustrated. Said Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors:

“ABC used the faces of the black community to exhibit a watered-down message of hope and reconciliation. And Obama collaborated. Instead of what felt like a placating and painfully repetitive conversation about issues – which organizers and advocates had already broached with the president – we should have been discussing more pressing matters.”

The townhall was part of a series of events the President has participated in this week in the wake of the Dallas rampage that left five police officers dead and eleven others wounded, following the two police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota earlier in the week.

On Wednesday, Obama had convened a longer, edgier meeting at the White House with police, elected officials, and civil rights advocates to address what all acknowledge is a gaping divide between communities, viewpoints, and races.

We wanted to get your take on the president’s interchanges with the audience. So our survey this week gives you a chance to share your opinion since most of us were not physically at the townhall.

Please explain your answers in the comments section below and look for our survey recap in the next day or so.

Sharon Kyle Publisher, LA Progressive.

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Posted on July 16, 2016

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are those of the individual contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the LA Progressive, its publisher, editor or any of its other contributors.

About Sharon Kyle

Sharon Kyle, J.D. is the Publisher of the LA Progressive which she co-founded with her husband Dick Price. Ms. Kyle is a professor of law at Peoples College of Law in Los Angeles. She sits on the union board of the ACLU of Southern California and is on the editorial board of the BlackCommentator.com. Ms. Kyle is the proud mother of a teacher and an attorney and proud step-mom of a premed student.

Comments

Quite honestly, the absolute first step should be for Obama and congress to immediately repeal the Bill Clinton criminal law. That is the genesis of so much of this “race issue.” You cannot, year after year, drain 51% of young black men from their families and communities. They are sons, brothers, fathers, cousins, friends and church members. Taking them away to fill the maw of the private prison industry has a predictable result: you destroy the very fabric of those communities. Then millions are spent to militarize police departments that serve those communities. There are no face-to-face meetings between the community members and the police. Can you imagine how much different things might be if there were such community confabs? Both sides laying out issues they have and try to work towards solutions. There are no jobs or life skills training for these communities. No government tax incentives to get businesses to invest and come into these communities to offer services and jobs. Instead of a human-to-human outreach, our governments spend money on body cams! They won’t stop jack shit! May record egregious behavior, BUT WHY NOT FOCUS ON THE GENESIS OF THE RACE ISSUE? People not communicating within their communities and with the police. Can you imagine if a cop does a traffic stop for a broken tail light, that instead of being scared to death as he approaches the vehicle, with adrenalin pumping, he would have recognized the divers face? How much different could that have turned out. But starting at the very top with Obama, he and congress are complicit in causing all these deaths. They condemned the criminal law during the campaign, acknowledging the gross difference in its racial application, BUT HAVEN’T DONE A THING TO REPEAL IT AND TRY INVESTING THOSE MILLIONS INTO THESE COMMUNITIES! Instead they stand back and condemn the ongoing ghettoization that law has created in our black & POC communities, but won’t take ONE STEP to fix it. Mr. Obama, you should hide in shame. You’ve done NOTHING for our black and POC citizens. You are such a complete disappointment; the first black president who’s done nothing to help our black citizens. All talk. No walk. It’s my thought that BLM needs to take on the Black Caucus in congress and DEMAND they get that law repealed IMMEDIATELY! Check each first for how much campaign contributions they get from the Clintons lucrative private prison industry.

Who knows about these things? A conversation about the human condition, in which people themselves exercise more than power, dominion, is as important now as anything else; no other problem outweighs the fact that regular working people–the overwhelmingly vast majority of humanity–have neither a voice nor an organized presence in the way things work.

This is especially true in regard to an issue like ‘race.’ We absolutely DO need to talk about these things, but everyone who has something to add needs to have a chance to weigh in, to wit: “The essential point is relatively simple to state: for reasons unlikely to be entirely random, those more or less in charge of matters in the social world have substituted a causal explanation for most conflict on Earth that is at best meaningless, an explanatory nexus that guarantees to those who use it that the sorts of problems that it purports to explain will deepen and worsen—introducing all and sundry to a world where a ‘race’ that doesn’t exist induces horrible ‘racism’ that in turn brings about all that is wrong with our relations with each other.”

Or, put another way, “Racism amounts to a label the use of which guarantees the noisome outcomes and vicious behaviors that its employment purportedly wants to reduce or avoid; moreover, it is a label for which the empirical basis of what it implies is nonexistent: ‘White’ people are not Golden Retrievers, nor ‘Black’ people Dobermans, nor those from China Pekinese—one human ‘breed’ is the fact and rule of Homo Sapiens existence.”

My grandmother was wont to say this: “a word, to the wise, is sufficient.”

Los Angeles

Michael Krikorian: There may be more doomed locales in town – the coroner’s identification room, a hospice where the only hope is that the end will soon come – but, for a mass gathering of gloom, nothing beats the CJ crowd on a Sunday.